What Can I do With Data?

Data is often called the new oil or the new gold. As if a “pot of gold” is waiting for you, because you stay ahead of the competition thanks to the data. What matters is that data is valuable.

That is why companies increasingly want to do ‘something’ with data, or at least this is what you hear. But what does that mean ‘to do something with the data’? The challenge is that you do not actually know exactly what to do to get value from data. You know that you have to change something, but not exactly what. Even if you have an idea here, it is sometimes difficult to determine where to start.

Growing in data maturity

This is important because digital commerce now plays a crucial role in changing business models and maintaining a competitive advantage.

By setting organizations along the digital commerce yardstick, we (at our digital marketing agency) map out where they need to develop in order to grow in adulthood.

Data forms an important pillar of digital commerce. Other pillars are processes and organization, marketing, customer experience, technology, and branding. Data helps you monitor your performance and can help you optimize your products and services. Data ensures smarter digital commerce.

Grow step by step

Data can indeed be a pot of gold. But to find that pot of gold there are a number of conditions that companies have to meet. Actually, it is just like “putting the customer first”: everyone wants it, but only having customers is not enough. This also applies to data-driven work: only having data is insufficient. The entire data maturity of your organization must be up to standard. To get there, we distinguish six sub-areas to increase your data maturity:

Architecture

To get value from data it is essential to have an overview of which information is available in which way. After that, it is crucial that you can easily link sources and that you can quickly access data. This is a condition for generating value from data. Many companies link their data from customers to create a 360 ° customer view. However, if this data is only accessible with specialist knowledge (for example SQL), and it makes it more difficult to generate value from data.

Data Quality

Constant monitoring and improvement of quality is essential to generate value. Moreover, you have to take steps to enrich the available data. The more qualitatively good information is available, the more value you can get from your data. For example, many companies never check whether the system contains duplicate profiles with matching identifiers (e.g. e-mail, name, address). This makes it seem like the system contains more unique customers, and the image of your customers is incomplete.

Data Management Strategy

Data must be available and up-to-date, but it is crucial to stimulate the use of data internally. Use your data to sharpen the business case and link clearly formulated objectives to it. In addition, give space to use data to make more rational decisions with a better predictable result. It is important that you apply insights on the basis of data, for example in an A / B test. Even if it does not yield something directly, it is often the first step towards a valuable application of data.

Resources (people)

To generate value from data, you as a business must also employ the right people. This often starts with business intelligence specialists and data analysts. For absolutely new applications, you as a business organization will then have to take the step to data engineers and data scientists.

Data Application and Implementation

The application of data is about analyzes and reports. Start with static analyzes and reports and then take the step to be able to do this more and more real-time. Besides, as an organization, you first have to do exploratory and descriptive analyzes before you can start with predictive analyzes. Analyze first, for example, what a price reduction has yielded in the short term. After this, you predict from the insights at which point a drop in prices is most profitable.

Data Governance and Processes

If you work with data, it is essential that you handle this correctly. By identifying the risks and creating internal awareness for them, you limit the chance of errors such as the chance of a data leak. Do this, for example, by seeing who collects data in any way, how it is stored and to what extent this collection and storage is safe. Then you can generate value from data in a responsible way.

Your golden pot of data

Perhaps you are one of the people who want to “do something with data.” You know there is a pot of gold somewhere, but you do not know how to get there. If you do not know where to start, it is essential first to map the current situation of your business. Then you put the steps in a row (with a roadmap) that you eventually bring to the pot of gold. Good luck!